Category: Puppet Labs

Puppet Labs today announced the availability of a Kubernetes module that extends Puppet’s IT automation capabilities and functionality for managing infrastructure as code to the Kubernetes cluster management platform for containers. The Kubernetes module from Puppet Labs allows customers to generate configurations for Kubernetes clusters that can be disseminated across distributed teams to facilitate enhanced collaboration and application standardization. Moreover, the Kubernetes module delivers granular reporting and audit functionality that enables customers to keep track of Kubernetes-related configuration changes. The ability of the Puppet Labs Kubernetes module to track configuration changes allows customers to more effectively manage configuration drift and subsequently ensure that their deployments remain in keeping with their design specifications. As a result, customers can use Puppet Labs to audit their applications with a view to understanding the current state of their Kubernetes clusters. Importantly, customers who take advantage of the Kubernetes module can manage Kubernetes using the same Puppet Labs automation framework that they use to manage the rest of their IT infrastructure. As container usage skyrockets throughout the enterprise, Puppet Labs’ deep integration with Kubernetes and attendant functionality for Kubernetes configuration management gives customers a unified IT automation framework capable of managing containers in addition to infrastructure, networking components and applications. Puppet’s Kubernetes module continues to underscore the way in which it intends to differentiate from the pack of third party IT automation vendors. Expect Puppet’s Kubernetes module to garner increased attention as Kubernetes deployments in production environments increase in number and size within the enterprise.

Puppet Labs recently announced Puppet Application Orchestration, a platform that helps customers orchestrate and manage distributed applications. Puppet Application Orchestrator allows customers to model applications as code, thereby enhancing the operational agility of DevOps teams by enhancing their ability to deploy and operationalize applications. Puppet Application Orchestration enables customers to model dependencies between applications, database stacks and infrastructure components. Moreover, the Puppet Application Orchestration platform can model applications as code across multiple nodes and distributed infrastructures and subsequently map inter-dependencies for a distributed application to expedite application updates, performance monitoring and troubleshooting. Puppet Application Orchestration represents an extension of Puppet’s renowned infrastructure management tools that empowers customers to model their deployments all the way from infrastructure to application as code, thereby giving them an unprecedented degree of agility into full stack management.

Luke Kanies, founder and CEO of Puppet Labs, remarked on the significance of Puppet Application Orchestration as follows:

Over the past several years, Puppet’s model-based approach has become the standard for modern infrastructure management. Puppet Application Orchestration is a direct extension of our existing strengths and technologies, adding new tools and capabilities that give our customers a full management stack, from bare metal all the way up to modern distributed applications. It marks a huge step forward for the industry, and it’s just the beginning of another decade of innovation from Puppet Labs. Because Application Orchestration is built on the core concepts underlying our past 10 years of success, and can use any of the 3,500 public Forge modules, any team using Puppet has an unfair advantage over competitors who can’t deploy as quickly.

Puppet Application Orchestration marks a breakthrough innovation for contemporary application development given the complexity of distributed applications and their dependencies on infrastructures that often span a combination of on-premise, private cloud, public cloud and container environments. The uniqueness of Puppet Application Orchestration is that it works in conjunction with Puppet’s battle-tested framework for infrastructure management and orchestration and thereby positions Puppet Labs as a leader in application orchestration by empowering DevOps teams to optimize application performance, upgrades, monitoring and control. Puppet Application Orchestration’s ability to model applications as code also facilitates migrations of applications from one deployment to another by enabling the identification of inter-dependencies and critical pathways that need to be addressed in an application migration from, for example, an on-premise infrastructure to the public cloud. The innovation of the platform consists in its ability to model applications as opposed to conducting application orchestration by means of sequencing discrete actions. With an application infrastructure platform that builds on its well known infrastructure orchestration framework, expect Puppet to continue consolidating its market traction amongst enterprise customers and building on its unique position in full stack orchestration and management.

Puppet Labs recently announced a collaboration with EMC Corporation that renders DevOps technology from Puppet Labs more readily accessible to EMC Corporation members. As a result of the partnership, Puppet Enterprise will be available as a component of EMC’s Federation Enterprise Hybrid Cloud that delivers enterprise-grade hybrid cloud solutions that leverage public cloud solutions from vendors such as EMC Cloud Service Providers, vCloud Air and Amazon Web Services. Puppet Enterprise provides a framework for the management of infrastructure as lines of code, thereby increasing the operational agility of development and operations teams by facilitating the execution of multitudinous changes to infrastructure and application deployments. EMC Federation Hybrid Cloud customers can now rely on Puppet Enterprise to bring enhanced IT automation and change management-related consistency to their deployments. While the product integration between Puppet Enterprise and the Federation Hybrid Cloud constitutes the most critical component of this announcement, EMC and Puppet Labs have also agreed to partner to develop a DevOps readiness program to help customers accelerate their adoption of DevOps practices as well as their use of hybrid clouds. EMC customers can access Puppet Enterprise by means of the company’s service catalogue, the EMC Select Global Price List and thereby integrate Puppet Enterprise with any assemblage of EMC hardware and software. The collaboration between EMC and Puppet Labs represents a huge coup for Puppet by opening up Puppet Enterprise to EMC’s channel of customers whereas EMC, on the other hand, benefits from the feather in its cap marked by Puppet Enterprise in addition to the standardization of IT automation it brings to Federation Hybrid Cloud deployments.

IT automation vendor Puppet Labs today announces Enterprise 3.8 which features key updates to Puppet Node Manager and a new application called Puppet Code Manager. The recently enhanced Puppet Node Manager now features the ability to automate the initial provisioning of infrastructures in conjunction with rule-based logic and parameters that dictate when infrastructure should be rendered ready for production. Puppet Node Manager also supports the launch and configuration of Docker containers as well as a new Amazon Web Services module that takes responsibility for the deployment and ongoing management of AWS resources. As told to Cloud Computing Today in a phone interview with Tim Zonca, Puppet’s Director of Product Marketing, the AWS module allows organizations to leverage a unified IT automation interface for managing on-premise and cloud-based DevOps processes instead of Amazon’s indigenous orchestration tools and a separate Puppet interface for automating, streamlining and simplifying infrastructure management. The graphic below illustrates Puppet Node Manager’s user interface and the corresponding simplicity of its method for defining rules for infrastructure components:

In addition to an enhanced Puppet Node Manager, Puppet also announces an application called Puppet Code Manager that allows customers to define their infrastructure using code and subsequently manage the code—as opposed to the infrastructure itself—as it traverses different components of the product and software development lifecycle. Puppet Code Manager allows IT teams to more expeditiously apply a consistent methodology for changing, upgrading and testing their fleet of infrastructure components. Meanwhile, Puppet’s Bare Metal provisioning tool Razor is now generally available for the discovery of bare-metal hardware and the provisioning of OS on that hardware. Taken together, today’s set of announcements represent yet another important step on the part of Puppet to consolidate its leadership position in the IT automation and orchestration space. Puppet’s ability to render its technology applicable to a variety of infrastructures and platforms such as Amazon Web Services and Docker containers punctuates its relevance for IT management more generally. That said, the obvious question for Puppet Labs is the degree to which its automation technology can keep pace with the bewildering rate of change specific to the cloud, Big Data and computing landscape, particularly as Big Data technologies continue their aggressive maturation and application development, as exemplified by Pivotal’s support for a hosted distribution of Cloud Foundry on AWS, moves in the direction of increasingly agile methodologies that value precisely the automated management functionality that Puppet delivers.

Puppet Labs today announces the launch of the Puppet Supported Program to certify select vendors for the use of Puppet’s IT automation technology. The Puppet Supported Program testifies that participating vendors have passed protocols that ensure the seamless integration of Puppet Enterprise with their platforms. For example, the program validates that the vendors in question have the capability to accommodate best practice deployment of Puppet Enterprise as demonstrated by a rigorous testing program. The Puppet Supported Program launches with the participation of certified vendors Arista Networks, Brocade, Cisco, Cumulus Networks, Dell, EMC, F5, Huawei and NetApp. Today’s announcement builds upon Puppet’s recent capital raise of $40M that brings the total capital raised by the company to $86M to date. As told to Cloud Computing Today in a phone interview with Nigel Kersten, Puppet’s CIO, one of the next milestones for Puppet will involve extending the purview of its automation technology to networking infrastructures, even though Puppet has already begun work in this arena in collaboration with OpenStack and its Neutron project.

IT automation vendor Puppet Labs recently announced the finalization of a $40M capital raise in a round led by existing investors Cisco, Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Triangle Peak Partners, True Ventures and VMware. Puppet Labs intends to use the funding to expand its team, accelerate product development and fuel the expansion of the company’s global presence. Puppet’s CEO Luke Kanies remarked on the company’s latest funding raise by reflecting on the comapny’s history in a blog post as follows:

When I started this company, I wanted to bring the best IT tools and practices to the entire market, so sysadmins wouldn’t have to manage servers with one-off, fragile scripts, or be routinely woken by 3:00 a.m. pager calls, and so companies wouldn’t have to invest massive amounts of cash in bespoke solutions. Over the past nine years, our customers have realized great benefit from our efforts: Puppet is used today to manage everything from development environments in early-stage startups to massive data centers at Google, CERN, international trading houses and thousands of other diverse organizations. This trend will continue to grow. Puppet is managing more and more of the data center — including network infrastructure — and we’re already seeing Puppet at work in the internet of things. It’s only going to expand from there.

Here, Kanies remarks on Puppet’s trajectory from a startup that sought to bring best practices to the IT industry via automation to its current position as a vendor that streamlines and simplifies datacenter and networking operations for some of the largest IT infrastructures in the world. Puppet stands at the forefront of the IT automation space and expects that the recent round of funding will enable it to grow the number of organizations it has helped from 18,000 to something even more significant, quickly. This week’s investment brings the total capital raised by Puppet Labs to $86M. That its most recent round was led by existing investors speaks volumes about the company’s growth and the confidence had by its investors that the company stands to continue its upward trajectory with bravura and speed. Expect to hear more news from Puppet in subsequent months as it builds out a global team, expands its range of strategic partnerships and accelerates the purview of its IT automation offerings, including, as Kanies remarked, automation technologies related to the internet of things.

Puppet Labs today announces the release of Puppet Enterprise 3.2. Puppet Enterprise streamlines the management of IT infrastructures by providing organizations with tools to simplify and accelerate the provisioning of hardware, the deployment of applications, automation of infrastructure scalability and the orchestration of tasks. Moreover, Puppet Enterprise contains a variety of analytic tools that enable insight from log files, a discovery service that facilitates the diagnosis of issues within a specific infrastructure and reporting tools to enable more effective infrastructure management. Puppet Enterprise 3.2 features Supported Modules that provide pre-configured software for selected software components in order to facilitate its most effective utilization. Examples of supported modules include MySQL, PostgreSQL, NTP protocol and Windows registry. The modules enable the synchronization of software across different nodes, the set-up of database services, management of Web servers and the control of Windows components. Roughly 2000 modules are available on the Puppet Forge and contain custom-built code that improves the integration and performance of the requisite software within diverse, demanding IT environments. In addition to the supported modules, Puppet Enterprise 3.2 simplifies the process of deploying and upgrading puppet agents by 2-3 minutes per agent, thereby introducing significant efficiencies and time savings into the operation of Puppet Enterprise in large-scale IT infrastructures. Finally, Puppet Enterprise 3.2 features a preview of Razor, a next generation solution for provisioning hardware. Overall, this release delivers a substantial set of improvements to Puppet Enterprise that build on the company’s significant growth over both the last quarter and year. The release stands to consolidate Puppet’s leadership in the IT automation space, particularly given the richness of its partner relationships with the likes of Cisco, Juniper, Dell, VMware and Red Hat. Currently, Puppet Enterprise is used by PayPal, Cisco, WebEx and CERN as a result of its partnership with the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform. With its supported modules for specific software applications, Puppet Enterprise 3.2 stands to accelerate and amplify enterprise usage of DevOps-related software that manage the operational space between application development and the operational management of the IT infrastructures on which those same applications run.